Friday, June 4, 2010

From Gove to Elizabeth bay, nice easy sail, going around Cape Wilberforce and Point Williams and anchoring in the bay in what my depth sounder said was 36 feet of water. During the evening, two old men, anchored nearby on a lovely old cutter, came to say hello and confirm that we were OK. But early in the morning, Papy Jovial started pounding on a coral head just below the keel. I did not want to move in the dark, but as soon as I could see something, we took in 40 feet of chain and this solved that problem. I am afraid that the paint of the keel has probably been scratched, we will see that in Darwin.Then on June 2nd, the next morning, we left from Elizabeth bay to go through the Hole in the Wall, trying to time ourselves to go through with the first hour of the ebb tide. In fact, we got there with the last hour of the flood tide and had some current against us, but nothing serious, and we got through without any fuss. In fact, I was expecting something a bit more spectacular. You will have to wait until we get to Darwin to see the pictures. Coming out of the hole, we went left and anchored 6 miles further down in Gurulya Bay, extremely well protected, but again, one of those places where you can't go ashore because of the crocodiles.After a quiet afternoon, evening and night, we left around 8 in the morning headed for Lagoon Bay with a nice SSE wind at 15 to 20 knots. It took us around 4 hours to cover the 26 miles and we anchored in Lagoon Bay before noon.Again, not much to say about those islands. They are flat, desolated and we can't see any life on them, maybe a few birds here and there, and those damn crocodiles which are supposed to be there, which prevent us from swimming, but we can never see any of them.After Lagoon Bay, again with an excellent wind, we went to Double Island Bay, a little different from the other bay, as this is a bay separated in three compartments by two islands, the middle slot being very well sheltered. This time, we decided to forget about all those warnings about the crocs and went ashore to explore the beach. We did not even see crocodiles tracks, as we had been promised, but instead we found ATV tracks ! Civilisation cannot be that far. In the bay, there is another boat, Lorissa, from New Zealand, which arrived last night directly from SEISIA, and is also bound for Darwin. Another of those 150 some boats signed up for the Indonesia rallye. We might see then again in Darwin.